In recent years, numerous states have passed laws requiring school districts to more closely monitor student attendance and truancy. This includes monitoring students who are chronically truant and frequently absent from the classroom. Many school districts are instituting new policies regarding permitted absenteeism and redefining unacceptable truancy. These laws and policies require that schools take certain specified actions immediately upon a student reaching a threshold of unacceptable truancy. However, due to lack of funding, shortage of personnel, and lack of availability of sophisticated technology, most schools and school districts are ill-equipped to compare, analyze and measure the effectiveness with the goal of improving student attendance.
Additionally, each school within a school district can track attendance in a different manner, using different absence codes. Further, schools across a school district do not always label an “unexcused absence” as recognized by state law or school district policy as an absence, but rather as a tardy, late arrival, early dismissal, and medical excuse without documentation, among others. Such variance among attendance tracking also makes it nearly impossible for school districts to correctly track truancy and take appropriate, timely action as required by their own policies and by state law.
Finally, monetary incentives, reimbursements and other funding for schools are often linked in one way or another to student enrollment and attendance. Thus, districts unable to implement systems for reliable and continuous attendance tracking will be unable to maximize the monetary benefits received.